As is always the case entering October, roster moves seem to never stop popping up on your Twitter feed. Today is one of those days, with the Red Wings continue to trim their final roster. Already waiving eight players Saturday morning, the team has now announced more send downs, this time involving waiver exempt players.
The names headed to Grand Rapids include: forwards Filip Zadina, Joe Veleno, Evgeny Svechnikov, Givani Smith, Ryan Kuffner, and David Pope, as well as defensemen Oliwer Kaski and Vili Saarijarvi. In addition, Jarid Lukosevicius, Gregor MacLeod and Dominik Shine have been released from their tryouts.
#RedWings have assigned forwards Kuffner, Pope, Smith, Svechnikov, Veleno and Zadina, and defensemen Kaski, Lindstrom and Saarijarvi to @griffinshockey
— Ansar Khan (@AnsarKhanMLive) September 28, 2019
Technically at 36 players, if you don’t include the eight waived players, Detroit’s roster is now down to 28 players. It must be cut down to 23 by Tuesday afternoon. In terms of the bubble players who made the roster, it looks like Dennis Cholowski, Michael Rasmussen, Taro Hirose, Christoffer Ehn, and Madison Bowey won out.
Needing to make five more cuts, in the coming days we should, Jared McIsaac sent to Halifax/moved to IR, and Chase Pearson and Filip Larsson should be sent down in the coming days. Jacob de la Rose is the only real mystery. I wouldn’t be surprised to see sent down as well.
First round pick Moritz Seider is also still with the big club. However, I would imagine the team is still contemplating whether he should go to Grand Rapids or Mannheim in the DEL.
Once those five moves are taken care of, they should be all set for opening night on Oct. 5 in Nashville. Here is a rough depth chart of what to expect being deployed:
Bertuzzi-Larkin-Mantha
Athanasiou-Nielsen-Hirose
Filppula-Rasmussen-Erne
Abdelkader-Glendening-Helm
Ehn
——————————–
DeKeyser-Hronek
Nemeth-Green
Cholowski-Daley
Ericsson-Bowey
——————————–
Howard
Bernier
The only real grey area in this lineup is the middle-6 centers. There has been some rumblings that Rasmussen will make the switch to center, but he could very well be switched with Filppula. One of those two could also man the second-line, with Frans Nielsen dropping to the third-line center spot. But besides that, the rest is a good bet on becoming reality.
Is this the best the Wings could have come up with? Whose knows. From earlier today, the WingsNation staff put together their own roster construction. See what they had to say below:
